I wasn't just wrong, I was being an idiot. "When Google was in the thick of Android's development in 2006 and 2007 - long before the platform ever reached retail - it was a very different product, almost unrecognizable compared to the products we used today. Documents dated May of 2007 and made public during the course of Oracle's lawsuit against Google over its use of Java in Android show off a number of those preliminary user interface elements, prominently marked 'subject to change', and you can see how this used to be a product focused on portrait QWERTY devices." I'm hoping I can dive into this a little deeper tomorrow; since it's the busiest period of the year for my little company right now, I don't have the time to do it today. Just to make sure nobody thinks I'm just going to ignore this, I figured it'd be a good idea to post a quickie today. I'll get back to this tomorrow, or Friday at the latest.

What's amazing about the Prada is not that it was better or worse than the iPhone (it was worse), but that it was the first large-scale phone designed with a finger-only interface - and I loved the keyboard (which, contrary to your statement, does have a letter keyboard). It wasn't as good as Apple's, surely, but it was still the first finger-driven interface.

That alone earns the Prada a place in history. The touch era started not with the iPhone, but with the Prada - which was a massively successful phone.

What's amazing about the Prada is not that it was better or worse than the iPhone (it was worse), but that it was the first large-scale phone designed with a finger-only interface - and I loved the keyboard (which, contrary to your statement, does have a letter keyboard). It wasn't as good as Apple's, surely, but it was still the first finger-driven interface.

That alone earns the Prada a place in history. The touch era started not with the iPhone, but with the Prada - which was a massively successful phone.

The thing that made the iPhone innovative was not a touch screen but the multi-touch nature of the screen and the innovative software that was built around it.

There were many full touchscreen devices launched prior to the LG prada even. Garmin nuvi series GPS devices for instance. Most PDA's were touch screens even before the Prada. But using an iPhone touchscreen versus a nuvi touch screen was not even in the same league as far as user experience goes.

Cars leading up to the Caddy had the similar concepts of gears, steering etc. but they were all different and unintuitive. Now most modern cars are driven like that Caddy because it brought it all together and made cars intuitive for the masses. Your "LG prada did it first" argument is like saying some arbitrary car before the Type 53 had gears and a steering, so the type 53 is not the tipping point it is claimed to be. The reality of the matter is most smart phones today work like the iPhone and not the Prada.

You don't flick to scroll on the Prada, nor you do you double tap to zoom portions of a webpage, or pinch to zoom on it. Other than it being a touch screen device it is rather uninteresting historically.

That alone earns the Prada a place in history. The touch era started not with the iPhone, but with the Prada - which was a massively successful phone.

No it didn't, because no one copied the Prada. It was an evolutionary dead end. It had no descendants. Real evolution is full of examples like this. Full of examples of ecosystems pregnant with the possibility of a major new mutation, one that could lead to endless derivative forking mutations and ones that will thus change the ecosystem. But there are also plenty of examples of botched mutations, mutations that take the pregnant possibilities and express them a way that is an evolutionary dead end, in a way that leads no where.

The Prada was an evolutionary dead end because nobody copied it. Nobody. Nobody was inspired by it to redesign their phones. Nobody. Nobody changed their products or their product development because of the Prada. Nobody. The Prada was made first announced on December 12, 2006. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs little more than a month later on January 9, 2007. Thus the two phones were made known to the world at almost the same time.

Since then countless phones have been released that work just like an iPhone. They work like that because of the success of the iPhone not because of the failure of the Prada.

The Prads sold millions and millions of times and won countless awards - that's a failure for you? Strange metrics you have.

In a any case, you're so far into the RDF you can't even acknowledge a simple truth: the Prada was the first phone with a full touch interface - not the iPhone. It's absolutely fascinating and massively entertaining to see you squirming like this.

"That alone earns the Prada a place in history. The touch era started not with the iPhone, but with the Prada - which was a massively successful phone.

No it didn't, because no one copied the Prada. It was an evolutionary dead end. It had no descendants. Real evolution is full of examples like this. Full of examples of ecosystems pregnant with the possibility of a major new mutation, one that could lead to endless derivative forking mutations and ones that will thus change the ecosystem. But there are also plenty of examples of botched mutations, mutations that take the pregnant possibilities and express them a way that is an evolutionary dead end, in a way that leads no where.

The Prada was an evolutionary dead end because nobody copied it. Nobody. Nobody was inspired by it to redesign their phones. Nobody. Nobody changed their products or their product development because of the Prada. Nobody. The Prada was made first announced on December 12, 2006. The first iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs little more than a month later on January 9, 2007. Thus the two phones were made known to the world at almost the same time.

Since then countless phones have been released that work just like an iPhone. They work like that because of the success of the iPhone not because of the failure of the Prada. "

That is a laughably bad analogy, even by the standards of analogies - and it just goes to show that you have no clue how biological evolution actually works. Would you claim that dolphins are evolved from sharks because they share similar body shapes & similar adaptations to their environment?

The similarities are only superficial and there are fundamental differences between those two organisms, both morphologically AND genetically. There's a term for that: "convergent evolution", which basically means two or more organisms that develop similar traits, despite neither being descended from the other. Which is a much more accurate analogy for the relationship between Androids and iProducts.

If anything, your analogy is closer to intelligent design, if not out-and-out creationism. Maybe you should back and re-read some of those 10th grade biology texts, instead of basing your understanding of evolution on Pokemon.

Repeating things (in general, not just this) like they're some mantras won't make non-RDF-ed people believe... (though, sure, it can strengthen your faith, shield you stronger in the perception bubble of your very atypical place; and http://www.osnews.com/permalink?516201 )

Curious BTW how that "announced on December 12, 2006" Prada won the iF Design Award in September 2006.